Gurman says iPhone sideloading on iOS 17 will be limited to the 27 countries belonging to the EU
- Austria
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Croatia
- Republic of Cyprus
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- Ireland
- Italy
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Malta
- Netherlands
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
The Digital Markets Act is forcing Apple to allow iPhone sideloading in iOS 17
In the podcast, Gurman said, “I think it will be a Europe-only feature. I think that they’re not going to shoot themselves in the foot and expand this globally if they don’t have to. I think they’re going to play it similarly to other changes they’ve made to the App Store. If you remember, there was that change in the Netherlands around dating apps and the percentage there. And so you have to install a special profile, you have to go through some sort of hoops to do it, and it was very under the radar.”
Apple might charge developers to allow their apps to be sideloaded on an iPhone in the EU
He added, “So I think they’re going to push more in that direction. I would be a bit surprised if they announced it at WWDC and made this a highlight consumer feature. I think they want to sort of downplay it as much as possible. At the same time, I think this has been a major undertaking inside the company. This has been a exhaustive project across the board, across several divisions, across Services, across software engineering, across any departments at Apple. Legal, marketing, the App Store department certainly.”
If Gurman is right, sideloading will not even be mentioned by Apple at WWDC and will not exist outside of the aforementioned 27 member countries of the EU. What would it take to get Apple to allow sideloading in the States? Legislation that makes it out of Congress and gets signed by the president would do it. Gurman says that perhaps what is happening in the EU will energize lawmakers in the U.S. giving them an incentive to write some bills that would force Apple to allow sideloading in the U.S.